Sociology 2111: Week One
"There's nothing so practical as a good theory." Leon Festinger
I. Introduction: the practicality of sociology
A. What is the greatest asset of humans as a species and as individuals?
The ability to think... certainly includes how we relate to the physical world, but also how we relate to the other people...
B. Our goal in this course: to understand a particular kind of thinking that has only emerged in the last few hundred years and to begin developing a theoretical basis for your own sociological work
C. C.Wright Mills: "The sociological imagination"
Quality of mind that is needed in order not to be a victim
1. Ability to understand the intersection of history and biography
2. Ability to understand the connection between private troubles and public issues
II. Syllabus and course requirements
A. My home page and its links
B. 2111 links
C. Internet discussion board
III. Sociological Theory
A. Definitions
1. Science: the process of inventing and systematically testing theories
2. Sociology: the science of social forces
3. Social forces: the pressures and expectations generated by our relationships with other people
4. Theory: a statement or set of statements linking concepts, usually in causal relationships
5. Concept: a definition that singles out some aspect of social reality that a the sociologist believes will be significant to her/his theory
Barbara Garner: "Theories are claims that there are patterns in the empirical world; theorists invent concepts that help us to see these patterns. The concepts point to key features of the empirical world. Theorists not only chart the real world, they try to explain the patterns they see. As social reality changes, theories have to be revised or discarded."
Garner again: "Many theorists take a negative-critical view of social institutions...they point to injustices and inequalities among human beings and hope that their ideas can contribute to ending this state of affairs. Controversies among theorists are not only about ways of interpreting reality, but also about the prospects for changing it." (My later comment: no accident that Martin Luther King was a sociology major.)
B. Example of a mini-theory: People from more privileged social class backgrounds are more likely to complete college.
Causal diagram: Social class>>>>>>>college completion
How could we test this theory? In what ways could we elaborate the theory?
C. Cooperative learning groups: assignment 1
IV. Under what circumstances
does sociological theory first arise? Let's back into this by first looking
at societies that don't produce much social theory, much less sociology
A. Europe in the middle ages:
1. Lack of mobility
2. Rural and isolated
3. Lack of literacy
4. Role of tradition
5. Role of religion
"...they knew that the purpose of life was preparing coming generations to do as past generations had done." (Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family)"By the thirteenth century ... the main features of village life were established as they were to exist for another five hundred years." (Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages)
B. Our tentative theory: sociology will not arise where there is a stable way of life, sacredly legitimated, with minimal knowledge of other societies
Applies to Europe in the Middle Ages, but equally to India, China, Japan, the Incan or Mayan Empires, Egypt... probably also applies to the old Soviet Union
V. So what were the causes of what sociologist Randall Collins calls "the
discovery of society?" (and why is it all but impossible to establish the
causes of something that happens only once?)
A. Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition... argues that sociology
is an indirect result of what he calls "the two revolutions," (the
French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution)...
1. French Revolution and Napoleon--1789-1799: Monarchy, nobility, and church can all be overturned.
a. Democracy: universal manhood suffrage at least briefly
b. Equality before law, instead of different legal rights for the clergy and nobility
c. Church and state
d. Family: civil marriage and divorce
e. New concept of citizenship: "Allons enfants de la patrie"...nationalism, military draft and the conquest of Europe
r. Bureaucratization(Napoleon)Other countries of Europe had to copy parts of the French system in order to turn back the French conquest of Europe.
2. England: Industrial Revolution (1780-1850): Life for large numbers of people can change quickly and dramatically (rural to urban)
a. Mechanization and practical science
b. Agri-business and the enclosures
c. Government role: promote private profit and economic development--let the market operate.
d. Enormous profitability
e. Urbanization, factories, and the growth of an urban working class.In the late 18th century, the GDPs of France and England were roughly equal; by 1850, English GDP was twice that of France; other societies could emulate England's economy or become irrelevant.
3. Why not "Three Revolutions" and include the American?
A. Conflicts within Christianity that started as early as the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century: no longer a consensus about God's will. By the end of the 17th century, England was even prepared to promote religious tolerance.
B. The Philosophes and the Enlightenment. The authority of reason over God and tradition.
C. Exploration and Colonialism.... or was the intellectual impact of seeing all these other ways of life largely mediated by racist beliefs?
D. Changes in the Universities... the rise of the natural sciences, the decline of philsophy.
VI. Lemert: a selection of his ideas and thoughts occasioned by his ideas
A. Social theory as a survival skill.
1. "Normal accomplishment of socially adept creatures figuring out what other creatures of the same sort are up to."
2. Key to good theory lies in the observation and analysis of the insignificant and mundane... why?
3. People who do theory well live better, with more power and perhaps more pleasure.
4. If social theory is done necessarily and often well, by people with no academic credential, what is the advantage of sociology?
a. Role of systematic, empirical research... what about those bus bathrooms? what about the relation of social class and higher education?
b. Community of scholars... mutual criticism, replication, norms about how to handle what Weber called "inconvenient facts"
5. What created the outburst of social theory in the early modern era?
a. growth of cities creates the exposure to differences that stimulates a new way of thinking. "Hardly anyone who lives in or has recently visited a modern metropolis could fail to understand intuitively what Simmel meant by the psychological individual who, even on crossing an urban street, must react differently from-and thus become some other sort of human individual than-a rural cousin or an ancestor in an early thirteenth-century village."
Chicago field trip... police-citizen relations: the view from the kids at the Cuarto Ano program vs. the view from the police on ride-alongs
Is it everybody in the city, or only those who escape their race/class/ethnic enclaves?
b. The first form of theory was comparative... a very strong sense of the emergence of something entirely new.
c. A growing belief in the validity of critical thinking... "daring to know" and the role of "public intellectuals" (we will want to consider which of our sociological theorists aspired to be public intellectuals)
d. The emergence of professional social theory... what Lemert calls "the bourgeois intellectuals"... the role of universities
e. Even so, the early social theorists were in various ways not entirely comfortable with the surrounding cultures
Karl Marx: university career not open to him because of his irreligion and his radical ideas... life-long poverty and self-definition as a revolutionary
Max Weber: parental conflict and mental illness
Durkheim: a Jew (albeit nonpracticing) in the midst of the Dreyfus Affaire... his long struggle to get sociology recognized as an academic discipline
5. Is there a disadvantage to sociology in terms of building and testing good theories?
a. In spite of the tensions noted above, the major theorists were white and male and bourgeois in their origins... thus closer to the structures of power than women and minorities, who were excluded from professional social theory.
b. Once sociology had its place in the universities, a tendency for some of its chief practitioners to become a little too comfortable with their institutionalized position in society?
6. A new period of great creativity in social theory, if not sociological theory, beginning in the 1960s... "Multiculturalism" "Postmodernism" "Deconstructionism"
a. the collapse of Europe's colonial empires after World War II
b. the rebellions within American and European societies beginning in the 1960s
c. the end of widespread belief that Western civilization offers the one viable vision of humanity's future (or indeed, that there is or ever will be, one vision)
d. the rise of modern feminism
e. the gay and lesbian liberation movements